OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 250, 18 July 1931, Page 20

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Beauty fn an Engine. "Beauty and utility are not opposed as so many people would suppose. Is a beautifully constructed petrol engine any less beautiful than the R.A. War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner merely because it has been designed to draw a lorry?” Bays Mr. A. E. Evans, of toe Battersea Polytechnic. “It is high time we abolished the intellectual snobbery which regards art, literature, music, and the classics as members of the aristocratic educational family, with science as a sort of distant cousin, and which spurns technology as being illegitimate.” So Simple!

“Euclid’s geometry has a great simplicity, but there are weak points in it, and it is the duty of modern mathematicians to fill up the gaps in Euclid s theory, which, in spite of its exceeding simplicity, is not altogether satisfactory. I base my theory entirely on experience of the expansion of light and of the velocity of it, ( the light being independent of the bodies in space and of their relative velocity and colour. The relativity principle underlies all geometry, and the theory of relativity is as simple as Euclid’s geometry. The general theory of relativity Is based upon the observed fact that the attraction of a lump of matter is exactly proportional to its inertia. Instead of saying that.one mass attracts another, and thus deflects it from its path, one can ascribe to matter the property of' distorting the space-time manifold. This would explain why the deflection from the Euclidian line is the same no matter what the mass of the deflected particle or the substance of which it consists.”—Professor Einstein.

Useless Air Stunts. “During the last twelve months there have been twelve collisions between Royal Air Force aeroplanes in mid-air, involving eleven deaths and also the loss of aircraft to the value of £50,000. A large number of these collisions are due to close formation flying, and there is often an increase in the number of accidents at the time when practising for the R.A.F. Display begins. The view is widely held among those engaged in aeronautics that owing to the exceptionally high casualty rate in the R.A.F. this year; close formation flying as it is done at present should be stopped. It is argued that it is a purely •parade-ground’ manoeuvre without value on active service, and that its risks outweigh any flyingtraining value it may possess. Aircraft J ll close formation cannot fight or watch . the sky for hostile machines. For.this reason the close formation is the most vulnerable. In addition it forms an excellent mark for anti-aircraft guns, -/The Aeronautical correspondent of the "Morning Post."

German Return to Diplomacy. Bruenlng and Curtlus have taken, by way of the Austro - German Customs Union negotiations, .the first diplomatic initiative upon which Ger manv has ventured since the war. ior the time being they have tured that initiative. They take the Une that from France in her present mood nothing is to be expected save by way Of hard-driven bargains or concessions due to French fear of being isolated in Europe and the world, ana of seeing her laboriously - constructed European system of alliances (based purely on the fear complex and the appeal to self-interest and the instinct of self-preservation) break up. By the move towards Austria they have at least presented themselves with a great bargaining point which they never had before. But through all they seek to' keep the Anglo-Saxon nations well disposed towards Germany, and to direct this racial bloc against French conceptions of a Europe frozen forever in the shape into which it was arbitrarily and unscientifically forced by the peace treaties.” —“Time and Tide.” First Signs—But Slow.

' "Some people think that we are just showing the first signs of improvement, but the accumulation of stocks of great central Commodities at the end of last year was very great, and there is not the least doubt that that accumulation, together with other fac-. tors, will tend to restrain that upward movement for commodity prices with which a great deal of the improvement and change for the better in trade conditions is bound up.”—Mr. William Graham, President of the Board of Trade.

The English. “What strikes me with the English Is their sense of nature, the. instinctive consciousness of the laws of nature. Of all the civilised people I suppose it Is the English who are really closest to the' understanding of living nature, said Professor Andre Siegfried, in a speech reported in the “Oxford Times. “You know the rhythm of time, and in your ways of thinking and feeling you always are, or try to be, In sympathy with nature. You are born observers of everything natural, and especially born observers in human psychology, in what is essentially nature. There are no greater psychological people than the English. You have a' sort of devotion to nature In its most simple form, and by this we are extraordinarily touched. But you have carried this further to the study of the forms of politics. With the English in politics you always, sooner or later, come back to reality. The English have always been the greatest educators in politics the world has known.”

The Booksneaf. “The pest who borrows your favourite books and does not return them Is to be known in future as a booksneaf,” says the “Daily Herald.” “The new word has been Invented by the Book Publishers’ Research Institute of New York. The Institute offered a library of fifty books as a prize for the best designation for book-lovers of politely thieving habits. Three judges were appointed as a committee, and from thousands of suggestions they selected ‘booksneaf’ as the winning word.”

Silly Business. “Here is an example I came across of trade lost through British manufacturers’ stupidity. In Guadalajara, Mexico, a firm wanted electrical plant. They asked a British firm for estimates. The British firm sent them In English with English weights, measures, and currency. They were thrown away,” writes Mr. Hamilton Fyfe in “Reynolds's Illustrated News.” "An American firm sent estimates in Spanish with Mexican prices and measures —and got the business.”

Hoarded Gold.

“The hoarding of the precious metal in Washington and Paris is not in itself the cause of the depression. It is merely a symptom, and it can be cured only by the resumption of foreign lending on the part of France and the United States, which would in itselr go a long way to revive the languishing consumption of the capital importing countries. But no general revival can be expected until fundamental obstacles to international trade are, removed. What Is really needed is not general inflation, but the demobilisation of excessive tariffs and the scaling, down of war debts to a reasonable level, and, above all, the abandonment of the attempt on the part of producers to circumvent the inevitable laws of supply and demand. There is no short cut to world prosperity ,by the path of monetary manipulation. — Professor Gustav Cassel, the wellknown economist, at the Institute of Bankers.

“Let Sleeping Dogmas Lie.” “There are some I know who are disposed to say, ‘Let sleeping dogmas lie.’ It is no exaggeration to say that that is precisely what sleeping dogmas tend to do. It is well within the mark to say that if they sleep a long time, fbr a few centuries perhaps, they lose the virtue they once had of being able to give expression to the. truth.” —The Rev; Professor A. B. Macaulay. •

Protection and the Average Man.

“There is no doubt that for the average man Protection has lost many of its terrors. He recognises that Free Trade. theory presupposed a wide degree of elasticity in our internal economic system, whereas since the war that system has been the most rigid in the world. The theory demanded also that no obstacle should be placed in the way of movements in prices as a result of international movements of gold, whereas In recent years gold has been allowed no such freedom of action. Again, the average man sees the protective tariffs of other nations not relaxed but strengthened and his own power of bargaining made illusory. He has had some acquaintance with protective duties in recent years and has observed little evidence of Inconvenience or exploitation. His view that the replacement of foreign manufactured goods by products of British industry must tend to relieve unemployment is an instinctive belief rather than a ' reasoned conviction.” —“The Round Table.”

Word Coiners.' “We see by the papers that Sirs. Gifford Pinchot has coined the word ‘radiorator’ In a recent speech. We’d like to strike off a few coins in the same series: 'Radioful,’ for instance, and Tadiorrible.' And why not ‘radiorchid’ for exotic flowers Of speech?”— “New. York Outlook.” ... .... , The Quest in the Blue. .

“But most fascinating of all the phenomena which Piccard 1 and Kipfer set out to investigate is that of the cosmic’rays—those strange rays which are continually piercing us and everything around us through and through, but of which we are all unconscious, of whose very existence we have only known for a few years. These cosmic rays are certainly something fundamental in the structure of our universe. They can best be studied at, great height's above the earth. Piccard and Kipfer went daringly into the great spaces in quest of knowledge of the very stuff of being, of the very bases of the world. Others will follow where they have led until the secrets of the air have been fully probed. It must ever be so while man remains man, consumed by the unquenchable lust to know.’’—“Daily Herald.” .

Reunion and Truth.

“However passionately we may pray and work for reunion, however thankful our hearts may be for the unexpected and strong desire evinced by the Greek Church to draw closer to us, yet we have to remember that there is one thing greater than reunion, namely, truth. We must never dream of gaining any measure of reunion through false pretences or, still more, at the expense of truth dearly bought and faithfully maintained.’’ — The Rev. 0. M. Chavasse, Master of Peter's Hall, Oxford.

Two Kinds of Rich. —miMMii'HOnw. “We owe the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University to that private munificence which has been the nurse of all culture and education from the earliest times. We are so accustomed to see Oxford and Cambridge and .to think they have always been there —that they must have dropped from the sky. No State nurse had they. They owed their endowments to the piety and faith of former generations. To-day we celebrate with thankful hearts the most recent and not the least generous of these great bequests in the true tradition of the history of Western civilisation. The rich are divided into two families. There are those who think only how they may heap the largest pile together before they die, so that the State may take half of it,” he added, “and there are those who regard their wealth as a privilege and responsibility, and whose greatest pleasure—and there is none greater—is to look round and consider how they may lay out their wealth for the benefit of their fellowmen and posterity.”—Mr. Stanley Baldwin, as Chancellor of the University, when opening the beautiful Courtauld Galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University.

Poison Gas-and Fear. “All nations have agreed not to use poison gas unless the enemy uses it first,” writes Professor Gilbert Murray in the “Daily Herald.” “But we are all making experiments in gases: we are all piling up great stores of this thing which we are never going to use, except against the eneniy who can never exist, in the war which we have all renounced, and which the League has undertaken to prevent. No wonder all the nations are suspicious and frightened of one another! We have all renounced war; but we are still —most of ns—using spies against our fellow-members of the League. Why are we doing it? Are we all hypocrites? Were we simply lying when we signed our treaties? Of course we were not lying. The nations meant what they said. Every nation is sure of its own honesty, and rightly so. It only doubts the honesty of its neighbours. The remedy for that fear and suspicion is to cease to conspire and use. spies, to cease piling up armaments and poison-gases. So much for the fear; but what of the hatred? Well, we tend to hato what we fear."